


The Internship

by hexameters



Category: Mad Men
Genre: 1970s, College, Gen, Interns & Internships, Photography, Post-Canon, Summer, Vietnam War, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 14:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19427536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hexameters/pseuds/hexameters
Summary: Sally is the only girl intern at the magazine. The summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college is splayed out before her. The internship seemed like a plum job until she realized she was just going to be sitting in a dark room for most of it, mixing chemicals for her boss, Joyce.





	The Internship

Sally is the only girl intern at the magazine. The summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college is splayed out before her. The internship seemed like a plum job until she realized she was just going to be sitting in a dark room for most of it, mixing chemicals for her boss, Joyce.

Joyce is nice, but she has no idea how her father had gotten her the job. And then she had _met_ Joyce, which had baffled her even more. The women her father knew were not like Joyce. She wore men’s clothing and no makeup. She would tell the grandest, strangest tales about her last job at LIFE, detailing unseen photographs of the moon and plumes of smoke rising from flattened landscapes.

Eventually, she is allowed to sort through photos from unsolicited submissions for the arts section of the magazine. There are hundreds of them, and she soon realizes that the photos can usually fit into one of three categories. The first is the war, the second are nudes, and the third is what Joyce calls _same shit, different toilet_. This category consists of quotidian imagery that ranges from the soporific (a still life of a bowl of oranges) to the unimaginative (a group of teenage boys with long hair staring out at a camera lens in front of a movie theater). But Sally sometimes retroactively places these in the first category if the caption that accompanies it is something like “These high schoolers say they’re against the draft.”

She pours the ammonium thiosulfate over the photos and its stench follows her. Each day, she staggers out of the dark room and into the summer sunlight, squinting.

* * *

She has taken to wearing her mother’s ring on her left ring finger. After finals, before dragging her suitcase from the train station to the empty NYU dorm that would be her home for the ten weeks of the summer, Sally had gone to Rye to visit Henry. When he greets her at the station, he looks older than she remembers.

 _Your mother liked that rug._ She nods, pretending she hasn’t heard this before. Then he doesn’t say anything else for two hours. The words jostle something inside her each time he mentions Betty, like Sally is a room and someone has left something important in her, picking everything up and looking under it before putting it back in the wrong spot. Strangely, it is during these brief conversations that she thinks of her father, another man who says very little. And then she would wonder what made her mother pick such reticent husbands, and when and how Sally learned to be like them.

Henry leads her to the kitchen, where a jewelry box she half recognized sat on the table. “I’m still going through her things,” he says, “I keep finding more.”

Inside, there are brooches and a ring Betty used to wear on her pointer finger. There is also a pearl necklace, one that Sally had forgotten about, and seeing it makes her breath catch in her throat because she sees her mother so clearly when she looks at it again, the pearls resurfacing in memories, glinting like polished bones. There she is, in their old house in Ossining, their old car on those same quiet streets. The white house. Her mother with a stroller, Bobby a baby, Sally still small and the world looming, everything out of reach.

“What am I going to do with these?” Sally says. Henry frowns at her, as though the answer is obvious.

“You can wear them,” he says.

* * *

Her gold necklace from childhood is now lost in the mud somewhere upstate. It had fallen off the night she graduated high school. She had decided to skinny dip, drunk and high, with her friends in the Catskills. It had taken her months to stop reaching for the pendant, to stop trying to swivel the charm around on its chain, a nervous habit she didn’t know she had until it was gone.

So today, the ring is the only jewelry she has on. She nearly takes it off because the weather is so sticky and she dislikes the feeling of warm skin against metal, but she keeps it on and makes her way uptown. Eventually, she knows, she will forget it is there.

She is heading to a diner to eat with Hector, a boy she had dated briefly after meeting him in a history class. They are still friends, or something like that. He’s working in a lab at Columbia over the summer. He’s pre-med. Like her, his summer job had also been procured for him by his father.

At dinner he takes her palm — right over the plate of fries — and holds the hand with her ring, his touch light. “What’s this? You engaged now, Draper?”

The ring hadn’t worked, anyway. A package had arrived for Joyce that morning and the delivery man had asked if she was a natural blonde, reaching out and pressing a finger through the end of her braid like a painter thumbing a brush.

“It’s a decoy,” she says.

“Then why say yes to dinner with me?” he says, winking.

“Not you,” she says, and she slips her hand away from his so she can grab a french fry.

He spends the rest of the night bumping his knee against hers under the table, and she lets him although it bores her, the feeling familiar.

* * *

The day after last Christmas at her father’s apartment, she had gone out on the balcony and he had followed.

She pats down her pockets to find her cigarettes. Don recognizes the action immediately. A battered carton of Marlboros appears under her nose, and her father gives it a little shake. The cigarettes rattle. He doesn’t smoke Marlboros — and more importantly, he had stopped smoking, abruptly and for good, after Betty died. She slips a cigarette between her fingers and holds it out for him to light. He strikes the match.

“I thought you quit.” she says, a trail of smoke unspooling between them.

“I did,” he says, offering no other explanation. A few years ago, she would have pressed him, but she decides she doesn’t care.

“What are you doing this summer?” he says.

She lets out a long exhale, the smoke mixing with the falling snow. She can’t think that far ahead yet. “Lifeguarding, I guess.”

“You’re getting a little old for that.”

The smoke wafts towards her face, stinging her eyes. “That doesn’t bother me.”

She takes another drag and his eyes flicker to the end of her cigarette, lingering on the embers, as round and red as a rosebud. “You should stop, Sal,” he says. She knows he’s talking about the smoking.

“You’re the one who offered.”

“Then you can tell people that I gave you your last cigarette,” he picks up the cracked ashtray that sits on the table and offers this to her too.

* * *

“Anything good today?” Joyce greets her at the water cooler in the office kitchen.

Nothing notable, though she did come across her third set of nudes that week, all of the subjects heavily tattooed, the faces cut off.

“Nah,” she says.

“Do you take photos?”

“I don’t have a camera,” she says.

“A girl like you,” Joyce smiles, “can’t get your hands on a camera? Well, Draper, do you want to borrow one?”

Truth be told, she hadn’t wanted a career in photography when she had applied to this job, and she still didn’t find herself interested in it. Looking through the submissions was interesting, but nothing she had selected so far had made it past the first round of selections. She didn’t have the _eye_ for it, the thing that made other people want to look at what she looked at. She would sometimes examine a photo and something would gleam inside of her, but what it was, she couldn’t be sure. She only knew that she felt different. But perhaps using a camera would give way to something new in her. Or maybe it had always been there, waiting to emerge like the earthworms that pattern the pathways in the park after it rained.

“Sure,” she shrugs.

* * *

In February Don had called to relay the details of the interview he had procured for her. She was to go to an office in midtown during spring break and bring copies of her resume.

“I don’t have anything to put on my resume,” she tells him.

“Come on. You’ve worked every summer since you were fifteen. Embellish it.”

She peers out her open door to look at her dormitory suite. Empty. “Is that what you did?” she says.

A beat. “Yes.” Through the receiver she can hear the faint ringing of a faraway telephone in Manhattan, and even though it is nearly nine in the evening she knows he must be calling from his office. “And now it doesn’t matter,” he says.

* * *

After her first week there is an issue of the newest edition of the magazine on every desk when she comes in. She pauses, hovering over the cover, then rifles through the pages. An article on the history of banana cream pie. A spread about an exhibit on Dutch flower prints at the Met. An op-ed titled “Why Vietnam?” that she is already skimming past when she catches a photograph in the corner, no larger than a carton of cigarettes, a crowd of soldiers looking at the camera, a tent behind them.

A face in the back, partially obscured by shadow, the suggestion of a dark brow. It’s not who she thinks it is. Of course it isn’t. Glen was discharged due to injury soon after he deployed — something she only found out because she had run into his mother that spring, and she had hugged Sally on the sidewalk to tell her how sorry she was about Betty and that her son was due to return. She called him after that, but he wouldn’t take her calls. Her letters went unanswered.

So she knows he was hurt in the war but doesn’t know the details. Bad enough to be allowed to come back, it seemed. A limb missing? A hunk of skin? Shrapnel to the chest?

That night she writes another letter to him, this time with her summer address as the return address, and when she puts it in the mailbox outside her office she can hear Joyce’s voice in her head. _Same shit, different toilet._

* * *

Sally stops by a corner store to buy a soda and a sandwich, and when she gets back to the dormitory, the Coke is already dripping wet, condensation slicking her fingers as she presses it against her cheek. She digs around in her purse for the silver lighter she stole from her old roommate. It knocks against the underside of her mother’s ring. She takes a few drags off of the cigarette, then stubs it out because between the warm air shifting through her lungs and the room that is now swollen with stagnant smoke, it is sweltering. She grunts, pushing against the window until it croaks open, the air so still that it makes little difference.

She carefully takes the camera of her bag and places it on her desk. It is clearly an older camera, and Joyce had warned her that the lens liked to get stuck. The buttons were worn and dents and scratches peppered the sides and bottom of the body. A battered manual came with it, the cover torn off, the last few pages missing.

Tomorrow, she decides, she will venture outside, armed with two rolls of film.

She tosses the lighter back into her purse and catches a glimpse of a bronze key. If she wanted to, she could take a cab up Fifth Avenue and walk straight into her father’s apartment. She could hit the circular button in the elevator, as shiny and round as as a wet eye, with the tiny PH engraved into it. The guest bedroom of her father’s place overlooks the park. Most importantly, it is air conditioned. She eats her sandwich and drains her soda, then she imagines cool breezes and the ceaseless whir of a machine, wearing nothing but her underwear as she lies atop the thin sheets.

* * *

She goes to a party that weekend in Morningside Heights, a dark, crowded apartment with a single ceiling fan that keeps shaking dust onto their heads. But the beer is cold enough, so she spends most of the first half hour drinking steadily. She leans against the hallway wall and smokes, glancing at the door every other minute because Hector’s the one who invited her and he hasn’t shown up yet.

When he does, she’s buzzed and he’s not, and she kisses him on the cheek in greeting because she feels like it. Hector cocks an eyebrow and smiles. “You look happy.”

“I don’t know about that. I’m just drunk,” she says, cocking her head.

He points at her face. “You’re burnt.”

“Oh,” she says, wrinkling her nose — her _perfect_ nose, as her mother used to say. “I was outside all day. I took photos.”

“For the magazine?” he sounds surprised. _Fuck you_ , she thinks impulsively, then laughs because it’s funny.

“Just practicing,” she says instead.

“What did you take photos of?”

“People. And places. And things,” she grins, the words slurring a little at the end. “Why, do you want one?”

“A Sally Draper original? Of course,” he grins back, and she can’t tell if he’s joking or not. “Happy Fourth of July,” he says, prying the half-empty beer from her fingers and taking a swig.

“What?” she says.

He gestures to the living room behind her. She squints through the haze of smoke. There is an American flag hanging up on the wall, and only now does Sally realize why it is there.

“God,” she mutters, feeling suddenly far more sober than before.

“What?”

“What is there to celebrate?”

“Plenty,” Hector says, and she laughs. He frowns. She realizes he’s serious. “Oh,” she says.

“Say, isn’t your stepdad a Republican? What would your family think?” he teases, his fingertips brush against her elbow, as if he is steadying her.

Something hot touches the skin on top of her foot and she jolts. She’s forgotten about her cigarette. It dangles between her two fingers, a scattering of ash near her toes, on her sandals. She presses the lit end against the wall then flicks it onto the floor.

* * *

She develops the photos. They’re all overexposed, the light bleeding across each image, most of the figures blurry. She’s glad there’s nobody else in the dark room to see them. She’s about to throw them into the garbage bin, shuffling through them one last time, the paper still damp, but she hears a knock on the door.

“You in there, Draper? Your stuff’s still on your desk.”

“Come in,” she says.

“Don’t forget, I’m out next week. Hold down the fort, will you?”

“Where are you going?”

“Florida to see my folks, then I’m going to try to stop by D.C. I have a friend who says he can get me some access. It’s a shitshow down there.”

“By the way,” Sally retrieves the camera from the table. “Thanks for the loan.”

Joyce holds her hand up. “Wait. Did you take any photos?”

“Yes,” she says, her eyes darting to the stack of photos next to the door.

“These?” she walks over to the pile.

“They’re not any good,” Sally says hurriedly.

Joyce rifles through them. She takes out one photograph. “Well,” she says, examining it. “No Pulitzer for you, Draper,” Joyce raises an eyebrow.

“Hey,” she laughs.

“But you should keep this one,” she says, holding up an off-kilter photo of a flower. It is one of the few that is in-focus. Sally squat on the pavement to get it. The sky is a blinding white. A bird is a mid-flight smudge in the sky. In the back, a pedestrian’s hand is almost out of the frame, about to swing out of view as it goes past, smaller than the flower and right under it, looking as though it might caress the underside swell of a petal.

“Why?”

“Posterity,” Joyce laughs. “Keep the camera. We aren’t paying you enough anyway. I’ll see you in August.”

“No, I couldn’t,” she says, panicking a little. But Joyce has already gone.

* * *

There is a letter waiting for her when she gets back to her building after work. It’s from Glen, something she recognizes without even reading the return address when she sees the familiar handwriting, spiky and long. She places it on her desk and eyes it from afar, chainsmoking. At last she rips it open with a finger and scans the page hungrily, then again, then again, then again.

It is an apology for not writing back to her. There were certain things, Glen writes, that he had to do in the war. Faces and things he would never unsee. He had nearly died from burns on his legs and torso, from a fire that had killed half his platoon not even two months after he first set foot in Vietnam. Sally sets the letter in her lap, hands shaking, and takes out her lighter. She doesn’t look at the flame as she brings it to the end of her cigarette.

* * *

“How’s work?” her father says, his sleeves rolled up, a suitcase at his feet. His flight to California is in two hours, and they are eating Chinese food downtown before he goes to the airport. Sally is hungover.

“Fine.”

“Meeting any interesting people?”

“I spend a lot of time alone in the dark.”

“Have you taken any photos?”

She eyes him warily. “Didn’t you know what the job was for before you told me about it?”

“I just knew it was better than sitting by the pool for three months.”

“Can I ask you something?” she says abruptly. He looks up from his plate, his chopsticks poised in midair. He looks apprehensive. “How do you know Joyce?”

He looks relieved. “From work.”

She narrows her eyes. “She’s never worked in advertising.”

“Well,” he says, resting his chopsticks on the plate. Don wipes at his mouth with a napkin. “She used to work in my building. She’s Peggy’s friend. You remember Peggy.”

“Sure,” she says, feigning disinterest, though she’s secretly relieved because she can sense he’s telling the truth.

“You like her?”

“Yes,” she says. He looks satisfied. “But I don’t think I’m going to become a photographer,” she says.

“That’s fine,” he says.

“I’ll just marry rich.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “That doesn’t always work out.”

“You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“What’s going on with you?” he says quietly, not even sounding angry. She knew what he meant. This was the old Sally, the petulant child inside of her, the one who had to grow up once her mother died.

Her right temple throbs. “Sorry. I think I’m coming down with something,” she lies, chewing carefully on her lo mein.

“You can always stay with me. But I know the Upper East Side isn’t radical enough for you.”

“It has nothing to do with that,” she mutters. She fiddles with the ring — today on her right hand so her father won’t ask questions — under the table. She should just take it off, she thinks. She’ll put it back into its box later.

* * *

On the day Joyce returns from vacation, she is perched on one of the stools, a string of photographs hanging from the twine that goes across the room. Sally stumbles back when she opens the door of the dark room, nearly tripping on her feet. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were in here,” she says. Joyce usually locks herself in her office in the mornings, emerging periodically to use the coffee machine, verbal only after lunchtime.

But today, she looks uncharacteristically awake. She is wearing a crisp blue shirt and her hair is tied in a knot. Sally eyes the empty mug of coffee sitting at her feet. Joyce lifts a lazy hand and beckons her over. “Draper, just the woman I need. What do you think?” Joyce says. The photos are black and white. In one, it is raining, and a man sits on the steps of a stoop with a cat in his arms, his head tipped skyward to look at a woman peering down from a window. There is another with a boy climbing the rocks in Central Park on all fours, a violin strapped to his back. She eyes an image of a man waiting on a subway platform, two parrots perched on his shoulders. One bird has a single wing lifted, as if he is waiting for a coat to be draped over it.

Sally reaches out to touch the edge of a photo at the very end of the lineup. It is a portrait of an older woman wearing plain clothes, sitting at a dinner table, plates wiped clean of food. Her lips are parted, and the corner of her mouth twitches into what could be a frown or a smile. There is a bookcase behind her with books stacked vertically on it instead of horizontally. Her nose veers slightly to the left, her head cocked with it.

“Nice, right?” Joyce says. “The light’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” Sally says, not sure of what else to add, because after weeks of looking through hundreds of photographs, she still doesn’t know how to describe them, only that every once in a while, some of them make her feel like she is an alien looking into another world.

“I knew they were good,” Joyce mutters. Then she yanks down a few photographs, the water shaking off of them as she shuffles them together.

“Are these going in the magazine?”

“Nah. Friend of a friend sent them to me. They won’t run these.”

“Why not?”

“They’re old. Look at them,” she gestures to the images. Sally realizes that the clothes in them look like the ones her parents used to wear when she was very small. Less hair. Wide skirts. Tapered pants. “They were in a box in some attic,” She holds out the stack to Sally. She takes them. “You can keep them. And remember,” she winks, “you should always write your name on your goddamn negatives.”

She clears her throat. “How was your vacation?”

“Uneventful. D.C.,” she shakes her head, “hot as hell, and my friend turned out to be a flake. I didn’t get anything good.”

Her eyes bounce down to Sally’s hand then back up again. “Called off your engagement?”

“What?” Sally frowns.

“Where’s your ring?”

“Oh,” she says. “I’m not engaged. I’m just,” she pauses, not sure how to phrase the sentence, “wearing it sometimes.”

Joyce considers this. “Smart woman. I should try that,” she calls over her shoulder. There is a gust of air from the hallway, then the door closes and Sally is left awash in red light once more.

* * *

After work on a Friday, she takes the camera to the East River, taking photos of Brooklyn before it gets too dark. She’s still getting used to the camera settings, but she finds she can get better images when the sun isn’t as bright. On her walk home, she thinks about how she should start packing her things in the next week. She already has her train ticket to get back to campus.

At the front of her building, she sees a man hanging around the front gate wearing a sweaty polo shirt. She averts her eyes, then does a double-take. “Hector? What are you doing here?” she asks. She hasn’t seen him in a while, due to declining the last three invitations he extended to her for various parties near Columbia.

“Sally!” he says. “I tried calling.”

“I was taking some photos,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“You don’t know,” he says, looking surprised.

“What is it?”

“The president,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “It’s over. Nixon resigned.”

“What?” she says. “Holy shit.”

“Swear to God.”

“You came all this way to tell me that?”

“Oh, man,” he shakes his head. “I can’t believe you missed it. I walked past all these bars on the way from the train, you can hear them cheering — the ones downtown, they’re all celebrating, can you believe —“

“Good,” she mumbles, realizing she should probably call Henry, who was supposed to meet her for lunch in the city the next day. He would probably be too busy now. “Sorry, Hector, I should go,” she says.

“Oh,” Hector says, looking disappointed. “You don’t want to get a drink or something?” he asks hopefully.

“No, I have to call my parents,” she says without thinking, then shakes her head. “You know what I mean. I mean my step-father. And my dad,” she adds, realizing she should call him too.

“Alright,” he says finally. “Man. This fucking country,” he says. He looks, she realizes, genuinely stricken. She wants to laugh, but catches herself and turns away before she does.

She runs the whole way up to her room, all four flights of stairs, heart racing as she takes drops her bag onto her bed. She picks up the phone, raising it to her ear. Her hand lingers over the dial, not sure who to call first. She wonders if she still has Glen’s phone number in her address book.

Sally pauses, squinting out the window, the street spread out before her. The lazy honking of passing cars fill the heat and the lurching shadows of a nearly set sun roll across the pavement. She sets the phone down — she’ll decide who to call in a minute — and reaches across the bed to retrieve her camera. She aims the lens at the window and focuses it on the people outside, though she can still see the faint outline of her own reflection in the glass before she hits the button.


End file.
